This fierce, self-titled debut album from Melt Yourself Down sounds fresh but feels
like the soundtrack to an old memory, finds Helen Brown.

Every now and then, a brand new record feels like the soundtrack to an old memory. And for me, this hectic and freewheeling duststorm of punk, funk,jazz and world music would have been the perfect score to a demented taxi ride I once took outside of Alexandria, Egypt. We were well clear of the ancient city by the time I realised that my driver was completely lost and spoke no English. Glass and wooden beads strung with evil eyes rattled frantically from the rear-view as we careered through the desert. There was a bizarre prang at an isloated crossroads. A blasting of horns. The metallic clatter from the dangling bumper. Abandonned laughter of some gun-toting security guards we asked for directions. Random bursts of disco music from the faulty radio. The warped beauty of the heat-hazy horizon. A giddy, fatalistic sense of abandonment to the momentum of the moment.

I can hear it all in the debut from the “avant-garde jazz supergroup” assembled by Acoustic Ladyland/Polar Bear saxophonist Pete Wareham. Driven to create “Nubian party music”, he called up Kushal Gaya, frontman of percussive and polylingual Bristol band Zun Zun Egui, drummer and composer Tom Skinner (Hello Skinny), clarinettist Shabaka Hutchings (Sons of Kemet), bassist Ruth Goller (Acoustic Ladyland), percussionist Satin Singh of Transglobal Underground and electronics guru Leafcutter John. The band took their name from a rare albumby American punk/jazz saxophonist James Chance and set about recording on an old Lightship, moored in East London. The consequence is an explosively danceable racket that was instantly sold as “the sound of Cairo ’57, Cologne ’72, New York ’78 and London 2013” and “modal jazz detonated by rhythms to rearrange the DNA”.

Essentially, it’s dance music, driven by fierce horn riffs that sound like they’ve been lifted from old technicolour movies about the Pharaohs, locked in back of an old transit van and driven at high speed over a pot-holed road by somebody on hallucenogenic drugs. It’s mostly instrumental but wild, snarling emissions from Gaya in shamanic mode add intensity. First single, Fix My Life, finds him repeatedly shouting “Gonna fix my life today!” with the edgy euphoria of an addict who’s hit bottom. There’s a distorted clubber’s squelch to the electronic pulse of second single “Release!” and a slow, sinuous sidewinding to the mercifully more mellow “Free Walk”.

The collective’s strength lies in their snakelike energy: all coiled muscle, hypnotic sway and dangerous unpredictability. The flaw is that it can all get a bit lairy. And while it sounds fresh now, by the end of the festival season, we’ll have seen a lot of leathery, old punks pogoing to it in their pants and jester hats.